Neil deMause

A who’s who of welfare reform heavyweights met at NYU this morning to debate whether the 1996 law is working, 15 years on. Predictably, they couldn’t even agree on what “working” meant:

Wednesday’s panel on the 15th anniversary of welfare reform, held at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, was certainly full of heavy hitters on the subject of how the 1996 law has affected American society. The lineup:

New York City HRA Commissioner Robert Doar, chief proponent of the city’s “Work First” welfare policies.

CUNY sociology professor and Glenn Beck target Frances Fox Piven, who has written about poverty programs for more than 30 years… [read more]

Now that the Yankees have built a new stadium and three new parking garages at tremendous expense (not all of it theirs), what do they need? Fewer parking garages!

With the new ballfields intended to replace those bulldozed five years ago to make way for Yankee Stadium: The Next Generation finally nearing completion — look, you can even see them now on Google Maps! — it’s time to finally turn the page on the ugly battle over the park-stealing, $2.3 billion stadium project, right? Or it would be, if not for the fact that the convoluted financing of the stadium looks like it’s going to have repercussions into the second Baldwin administration.

In the latest twist, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who’s largely stayed out of the Yankees fray — it was his predecessor, Adolfo Carrion, who lobbied heavily for the stadium and fired community board members who opposed him — yesterday released a “request for expressions of interest” for any developers who might want to build a conference center and hotel near the stadium site… [read more]

With unemployment still through the roof, are job training programs just preparing people for jobs that don’t exist?

As the economy threatens to sink into a double-dip recession, pressure is growing for federal, state, and local governments to do something about the 16 million Americans who remain out of work. One solution popular with politicians of all stripes—and with both business and labor groups—has been job training programs to close the gap between employers’ needs and workers’ skills.

“Even though a lot of folks are looking for work, there are a lot of companies that are actually also looking for skilled workers; there’s a mismatch that we can close,” President Obama said in June in presenting a community college program to teach manufacturing skills. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg has launched a series of job training initiatives, most recently as part of his new Young Men’s Initiative to aid black and Latino teens—a cause to which he gave $30 million of his own pocket money… [read more]

The deal to close CUNY budget gap includes a five-year, $1500 tuition hike, and many students and professors alike aren’t thrilled:

By Albany’s notoriously dysfunctional standards, it’s already been a banner year for unexpected breakthroughs. The same week in June that the state legislature broke its years-long deadlock over same-sex marriage, it announced a deal that promised to put an end to the year-to-year squabbles over funding for the City University of New York and State University of New York; under the new plan, tuition hikes during the next five years will be coupled with a promise by the state not to further cut funding for the public university systems… [read more]

Nouriel Roubini takes to Twitter to debunk last week’s rosy employment report, and I look at what it all means for New York City’s job picture:

Between the stock market nosedive and the S&P downgrade (based on a $2 trillion math error), last week wasn’t a great one for the U.S. economic outlook. There was, however, one glimmer of hope: U.S. employers reported they added an above-expected 117,000 jobs in July, as the unemployment rate fell from 9.2 percent to 9.1 percent.

Unfortunately, there to throw cold water on that hope was NYU professor Nouriel Roubini — best known as the man who predicted the housing bubble… [read more]

I’ve blogged a bit about the sports ticket bubble, but haven’t had the space to sink my teeth into the question of whether ticket prices are continuing to deflate, and if so what that will mean for the sports industry. Until now:

A few months ago, it seemed like Major League Baseball was in the throes of a ticket apocalypse. Through the first two weeks of the season, six teams had set all-time single-game lows at their current homes. The surprising Cleveland Indians led the American League Central in the standings, but remained in the cellar at the turnstiles. The New York Yankees, whose ultrapricey new stadium has been beset by empty seats since it opened in 2009, hosted record-low crowds for four games in a row. It was as if fans, having quietly absorbed more than a decade of price hikes and the advent of $9 beers, had spontaneously decided to go on strike…. [read more]

My Nation article on why cities keep pursuing sports stadiums and arenas against all economic good sense is now out from under the paywall, so go and read it now! Especially if you’re, say, a member of the Los Angeles city council.

How the news media dealt with — or failed to — the links between this spring’s severe weather and climate change:

On April 14, a massive storm swept down out of the Rocky Mountains into the Midwest and South, spawning more than 150 tornadoes that killed 43 people across 16 states (Capital Weather Gang, 4/18/11). It was one of the largest weather catastrophes in United States history—but was soon upstaged by an even larger storm, the 2011 Super Outbreak that spread more than 300 tornadoes across 14 states from April 25 to 28 (including an all-time one-day record of 188 twisters on April 27), killing 339 people, including 41 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (CNN, 5/1/11).

Ensuing weeks saw Texas wildfires that had been burning since December expand to consume more than 3 million acres (Texas Forest Service, 6/28/11; CNN, 4/25/11), plus record flooding along the Mississippi River, which couldn’t contain the water from April’s storms on top of the spring snowmelt. On May 22, a super-strong F5 tornado killed 153 people as it flattened a large part of Joplin, Missouri (National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, 5/22/11) ; in the first two weeks of June, a heat wave broke temperature records in multiple states, and the Wallow fire became the largest in Arizona state history (Washington Post, 6/14/11).

It was an unprecedented string of severe weather: By mid-June, more than 1,000 tornadoes had killed 536 people (NOAA, 6/13/11), nearly as many deaths as in the entire preceding decade. And it was only natural to ask: Were we seeing the effects of climate change?… [read more]

Answer: Or what.

​So Nassau County held its vote on the $400 million New York Islanders arena plan yesterday, and for team owner Charles Wang things went about as well as … it’s tempting to say “as well as a typical Islanders game,” but that’d be cruel. In any case, the final vote was 57-43% against funding a new arena (plus a new minor-league baseball stadium for an as-yet nonexistent Atlantic League team) with a 4% property tax hike, one that just might have been illegal… [read more]

My article on, well, why mayors love sports stadiums is out in the new special sports issue of The Nation, guest-edited by the inimitable Dave Zirin — unfortunately, it’s behind the web paywall, so unless you’re a subscriber you’ll need to buy an actual copy to read it.

Much of the rest of the issue is online for all, though; check it out, if only to admire me sharing a table of contents with Noam Chomsky, John Sayles, and Mark Cuban.